DISCLAIMER: These characters belong to Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and the whole X-Files gang, not to me. I promise to put them back when I'm done playing with them. This story is just for the entertainment of my online friends and myself, not for any profit.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: This piece of fluff popped into my head practically fully-formed over Thanksgiving weekend, 1998, at my in-laws' house. The title came to mind as we walked into the neighbors' house where we were going to eat dinner and the television was on. More than that I cannot say.

Please don't redistribute or alter this story in any way without the express permission of the author. Thank you very much.

For my mother, of all people.

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I was balancing the pie in a box in one hand and maneuvering a plastic grocery sack with the other as I attempted to buzz Scully's doorbell. Luckily, a small family group consisting of two very bouncy children, a man with a baby in his arms, and a woman carrying the hugest casserole that I have ever seen bustled out of the front door of her building just in time, so I held the door for them and got in before it shut. I homed in on her door partly following the distinct fragrance of sage and partly a ragged rendition of the "Washington Post" march blaring from her TV. By then I had my key in my hand, so, not wanting to disturb her, I let myself in.

"Hey, it's me," I called, shutting the door behind me. Sure enough, Macy's parade was screaming from the television, and her foldout table was at its full extension and set to within an inch of its life with her grandmother's linen, china, silver, and crystal, with even a honeycombed tissue-paper cornucopia as a centerpiece.

I bustled my groceries straight to the kitchen to find my hostess with the mostess standing in her flannel pajamas with an apron hastily tied over them, bending over a respectably-sized turkey as if she were beginning an autopsy on it with a vicious-looking fork and a baster, her hands swaddled in oven mitts up to her elbows. "Hi," I interrupted.

"Great--you're here," she barked, not sounding as if she thought it was great at all. "Put the pie on top of the fridge, stick anything that needs to be refrigerated inside, but only in the door, please, take your coat off, hang it up, get back in here, roll up your sleeves, and help me!" Yep, that was my Scully: raised in the military to learn how to give orders like a drill sergeant.

I quickly followed her instructions, and, as I returned, stopped her in the middle of the kitchen and gave her a kiss hello. "Hey there, Betty Crocker! How's it going?"

She sighed and brushed an errant lock of hair back from her forehead with her padded wrist. "It's fine, Mulder, really. This is just a helluva lot more work than I thought it would be."

I cuddled her close, doing my best to avoid being impaled on the fork, and rubbed her back comfortingly. "You didn't have to do all this just for me."

"I know," she sighed, smiling wanly at last. "It's just with my mom and everybody out in California, and you and me stuck here at work, I felt I had to try to make things at least a *little* festive around here." Her eyes practically glinted at me. "Of course, with you here, it's pretty festive already..." she trailed off, gracing my lips with a soft kiss.

"You know," I began again, reluctant to let her go just yet, "I *could* have slept over last night if you really needed a hand with some of this stuff..."

She pushed me away, chuckling. "Or a hand with some *other* stuff!" she laughed. I shrugged, guilty as charged, but she continued. "No, I needed you to pick up that pie. Were you able to get everything on the list?"

I opened the bag and rummaged around, putting things away as she drained hot water from a pan of potatoes into the sink. "Let's see: they were out of butter, so I got margarine. Is that okay?"

"Pickles," I listed, opening the jar and munching on one before putting the lid back on and tucking it into the almost-bursting fridge.

"Hey, knock it off!" she warned, turning to stir a different pot. "You'll spoil your dinner!"

"With one pickle? Besides, all I had for breakfast was a Twinkie."

"Breakfast? Oh, yeah. I knew I forgot something..."

Pulling the last item from the bag, I held it up with a flourish. "And, ta-daaa, whipped cream!" I gave the can a quick demonstrative shake.

"NO!" shrieked Scully, as if I was threatening to pull out one of her teeth. "I said 'whipping cream'!"

My brain shuffled verb suffixes, looking for an appreciable difference. My confusion must have shown, because she immediately shook her head, put down her spoon, and came to take the can gently from my hand. "I'm sorry, Mulder. I meant the stuff in the little paper carton that hasn't been whipped yet. It'll be okay," she murmured, patting my hand and tucking the aerosol stuff into the last corner of space in the fridge door. "I'll make a different kind of fruit salad, that's all."

Had we been outdoors and the ground not been frozen solid, I would have scuffed my toe in the dust sheepishly. "I'm sorry, Scully. Is there anything I can do to make it better?"

World War Three narrowly averted, she grinned, handed me a strangely-shaped kitchen implement, and replied, "Yeah. Mash."

"Huh?" I questioned, looking about as stupid as I felt, I'm sure, hoping I wasn't holding the tool by the wrong end.

As if teaching a small child, she led me by the hand over to the counter where the pan of still-steaming potatoes stood, took the tool out of my hand, and applied it directly to the potatoes, moving it up and down illustratively. "Mash," she repeated. "Make 'em mushy. Or have you ever had a mashed potato that didn't spend time as a dried flake in a box?" I imitated her actions dumbly as she bustled about, adding a slosh or two of milk into my pan, and doling out a small portion of her priceless butter with a sigh.

Other than that, I tried to stay out of the way while her kitchen filled with an amazing array of holiday goodies. She sliced veggies for a salad, tucking a slippery wedge of tomato into my mouth with another smile. I watched in stunned silence as she measured powder from a box labeled "cornstarch" into a cup of warm water, then stirred the resulting glop into the pan where the turkey had been and created gravy like the gods creating life on earth from primordial soup.

My impromptu cooking lesson was disrupted by the sound of a shrill referee's whistle from the TV. "Well," I began, "there's my cue..."

A perfect little hand emerged from the blur that was Chef Scully and grabbed me firmly by the upper arm. "Oh, no, you don't, Mister!" she barked. "NOT the f-word! We'll have none of the f-word at *this* Thanksgiving dinner!"

I laughed, flustered and embarrassed. "Wh-what?"

Her stern face barely concealed an imminent guffaw. "Football, Mulder," she whispered, "football. I figured that the one time I had to spend Thanksgiving away from my brothers, I'd at *least* get the day off from the constant barrage of football games. I just want to spend a quiet, peaceful turkey day with the biggest turkey I know!"

Knowing when I was beaten, and clucking in the best imitation I could muster of a turkey call, I trotted out of the kitchen and quickly turned the television off. Detouring past the dining table, I snagged a celery stick from the relish tray and waltzed back into the kitchen waggling it like Groucho's cigar. "For a minute there, Agent Scully," I intoned in a heavy Brooklyn dialect, "I was thinkin' you meant the *other* f-word, which you didn't seem to have any trouble with last Saturday night!" Noting my leer, she whipped a corner of the towel on which she was wiping her hands into my butt with deadly accuracy.

Before long, we had wrangled all of the food onto serving dishes and hauled it out to the dining table. Luckily, Scully had dissected the immense bird in the kitchen, not wanting to let me near it with a big knife, having seen me try to divide up a barbecued chicken less than successfully on more than one occasion.

I tucked into the holiday feast with abandon, inhaling turkey and gravy and letting the stuffing melt in my mouth. The only faulty dish on the table was the potatoes, which were riddled with lumps. I tried to apologize for my first attempt at potato-mashing, but Scully brushed it off, swearing that the lumps only made it apparent that they had been made from real potatoes. The substitute fruit salad was certainly no hardship, and I think I even ate a few vegetables that I'd never even heard of before. I only barely noticed how she nearly matched me plateful for plateful. I guess she really *had* skipped breakfast!

At last I sat back in my chair, surveying the damage we had wreaked. "A-men, Lord!" I breathed, completely sated and a little greasy around the edges. "Thank you for a fabulous feed, my dear. If you're looking for me, I'll be fast asleep on the sofa."

"Not so fast, Rip Van Winkle," my dining companion summoned. "The least you can do is help me clear the table, put away the leftovers, and stick the dishes in the dishwasher."

"Well, I guess so, if you're sure that that's the least I can do," I offered, beginning to pick up plates and silverware.

I finally understood the purpose of Tupperware as I saw the heaps of turkey shreds crammed into plastic dishes and shut under burping lids before they got sorted into the fridge in spaces I hadn't been able to find before. I poured the leftover water out of my glass into the sink and started to upend the goblet in the dishwasher rack.

"Don't you dare put my grandmother's crystal in the dishwasher, bub!" she ordered. "Leave it on the counter for now. We'll wash it by hand in the sink later."

Within a few moments, the table was cleared down to the table pads (who knew you had to pad a dining room table?), every edible scrap was tucked somewhere in the recesses of that magical fridge, every inedible remnant was wrapped up and carried out to the dumpster, and the dishwasher was shut up and set to come on later in some energy-saving cycle. When everything was put away, I gathered Scully into my arms and gave her a big hug.

"Happy Thanksgiving, Scully! I think I can handle making some coffee to go with the pie. Why don't you go sit down for awhile?" I held her at arm's length ready to shoo her out of the kitchen, then noticed the worried look in her eye.

"Uh-oh," she murmured.

"Uh-oh?" I echoed. "Is everything okay?"

"I don't know, Mulder. I may have overdone it a little at dinner. I don't feel so good," she whined, looking for all the world like a sick-to-her-stomach eight-year-old girl. The fact that she hadn't put on any makeup and was still wearing flannel pajamas did little to dispel this illusion.

"Do you feel sick, Scully? Can I help you?" I mentally scrambled for less useless things to say to make her feel better.

"I feel like I'm gonna throw up, Mulder. I don't wanna throw up," she cried. "That would ruin this whole Thanksgiving." My heart broke for her when I saw little tears starting to form in the corners of her eyes.

"Hang on, baby," I demanded, suddenly thinking of an idea. "Come out here and sit on the sofa with me. You need a tummy rub." I dragged her reluctantly by one hand over to the sofa and plopped her down next to me. I grabbed the wastebasket from next to her desk and sat it on top of the coffee table, "Just in case," I reassured her.

She settled uneasily back onto the comfy cushions, and I cautiously opened the bottom few buttons of her pajama top and scooted her pajama pants down a little over her soft belly. With extreme gentleness, I let my fingertips stroke her pale skin in a slow circle around her sweet navel.

Around and around my fingers smoothed, keeping up a constant, comforting rhythm, and making her skin warmer with each rotation. Slowly her eyes could focus again, and she sadly asked me, "Why did I do that, Mulder? Why did I make such a pig of myself?"

"I don't know, sweetie," I cooed. "Maybe you were just overcompensating because you had to be so far away from the people you love on Thanksgiving."

"Maybe," she concurred. "But you're here, and I love you. Wasn't that enough?"

"Maybe not. I think you miss your family most on holidays, that is, if holidays were special in your family..." I trailed off, trying to remember a special holiday in my family that went off perfectly or that we spoke of fondly afterwards. I was not surprised to have come up with none whatsoever.

Despite her lingering queasiness, she seemed to sense my hurt. "I'm sorry if I ruined your holiday, Mulder," she consoled.

"Don't be silly, Scully," I chided, smiling at her concept of ruin, "I'm here with the woman I love and safe and well-fed. For me, this is pretty damn good, as holidays go."

She sighed and nestled back softly against the sofa again, closing her eyes as my palm slid delicately across her stomach. We sat that way for a long time, the only sound the gentle friction of skin on skin, until I started to suspect that she had fallen asleep, but then she did the most amazing thing I'd ever seen, possibly aside from creating a meal that would have served a small army with her bare hands:

She belched.

This wasn't any dainty girly belch. This wasn't even any Scully-having-guzzled-her-beer-too-fast belch. This belch rumbled from beneath my fingers, barreled through her tiny chest, and rolled out of her perfect mouth like a charging rhinoceros, with about as much force and volume. I think she made my ears ring.

But as soon as the echo of this belch-to-end-all-belches had faded, it was followed by the most magical sound in the world: she laughed.

My Scully, not long before a horrid shade of green and praying that she wouldn't suddenly have to grab for the wastebasket, laughed a sweet Hallelujah Chorus of a laugh, and I blessed whichever god may have been listening for every joyous peal.

"Works every time," I assured her, standing up to replace the wastebasket on the floor next to her desk.

"Hey, come back here!" she commanded.

"Why?"

"I don't think I wanted you to stop yet." A distinctly wicked twinkle flickered in her eyes.

I decided that playing dumb would be the most fun. "But I thought you said you felt better?"

"Yeah, but you don't want to stop treatment too soon in cases like this."

"Is that your professional opinion, Dr. Scully?" I teased.

"Yes. Now get over here and rub some more. Maybe a little lower this time..." Matthew Sweet has it all wrong. The devil has blue eyes, or at least my favorite one does.

I resumed my place next to her on the sofa and reached for her smooth flesh once again. I had in fact noticed how arousing the peacefully intimate contact had been, but had chosen to keep my mouth shut in the interests of being a good caretaker. Now, instead, my hand stroked her skin a little more roughly, with a little more urgency, and produced tiny sighs and happy hums from my recently-recovered patient. I bravely allowed my fingers to slip under the elastic of her panties and tickle the soft hair hiding within them.

Just then, there was a heavy mechanical sound from the kitchen, and motors began to whir, accompanied by the sound of running water.

Scully's eyes opened, mildly startled, but she uttered a quiet "oh" of recognition, followed by a strangely frustrated look on her face.

"Everything okay?" I checked.

"Yeah," she sighed, chuckling to herself. "The dishwasher just came on. Never mind." Her eyes closed again as she settled her neck back in the bend of my elbow along the top of the sofa.

Her peculiar expression still intrigued me. "What?" I pried.

"Nothing," she rebuffed.

"No, that was definitely something. Did you forget to put something in? Did you want to go wash those glasses?"

"No, Mulder. Don't worry about it. It, uh, doesn't concern you."

I finally let my curiosity get the better of me. "Okay: what in the hell are we talking about?" I snapped, though I was careful to keep smiling.

"It's okay, Scully. Tell me. What's the dishwasher got to do with it?"

She swallowed a snicker. "You really wanna know, huh?"

"My life will not be complete until you fill me in, darlin'."

"Promise you won't laugh?"

"I promise nothing of the kind. Tell me anyway," I begged.

"All right," she sighed. "I don't get to run the dishwasher very often, but once right after I moved in here, I was reading something in the kitchen and happened to be sitting on top of it when it came on."

"So?"

"Think about how thirteen-year-old girls love riding horses."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Uh, think 'really big vibrator', Mulder."

It was my turn to stifle a snicker. "You're kidding! You get off on the dishwasher?"

"I used to, sometimes," she said, starting to sound a little defensive. "It's not like I did it a lot, or ran it when I didn't have dishes to wash, or even needed to do it since we've been carrying on like this."

"But you're saying you tried it more than once?"

"Yup," she admitted, her cheeks coloring slightly. "Look, it's not that big a deal. I shouldn't have even brought it up..."

I looked at my Scully with newly-opened eyes. She'd been keeping a dirty little secret from me, the revelation of which made her seem just a little less superhuman, and made me love her even more. "That's okay. I think it's kinda cute." At this she rolled her eyes. "Did it at least feel good?"

"Yeah, it did. Look, can we just drop it? It's been awhile since I had to ride the dishwasher to make myself come--I had almost forgotten about it. Besides, now I've got *you*," she asserted, snuggling adorably against me.

"And whaddya know, I do dishes, too!" I smirked.

"Oooh, multitalented. That always helps. I think the glasses can wait until later. Wanna demonstrate some of your other skills?" she crooned, standing and tugging me toward the bedroom.

"I thought you said you didn't want any f-word today, Scully..."

"Not that one, Mulder. The *other* one." She got behind me and started to push.

"Whoa! Hold it. I'll meet you there," I hesitated, swinging out of her reach.

"Why? Where are you going?"

"I forgot something. I'll be there in a minute." I jogged back into the kitchen and snared the object of my quest out of the fridge, hiding it from her view as I made my way down the hall to her bedroom.

My eager partner was already propped on her elbows in the middle of her unmade bed when I stuck my head in the room. "What did you forget?" she urged.

"It's time for dessert!" I announced.

She immediately started to talk me out of it. "I don't know, Mulder. I may be feeling better, but I'm sure not hungry for any pie yet."

"Who said anything about pie?" I interjected, revealing the aerosol can I'd been holding behind my back.

"Whipped cream?" It was less a question than a challenge.

"Sure!" I countered, flicking off the lid, upending the can, and squirting some directly into my mouth. "Those sheets are washable, right?" I garbled through the fluffy sweet stuff.

Scully rolled her eyes once and emitted a long-suffering sigh. "Yes, Mulder. Is this going to get weird?"

"Of course," I replied, flopping down on the bed next to her. "*I'm* here. What else did you expect?" I set the can down on the nightstand and reached for her shoulders, which were hunched in a resolute half-shrug, and pulled her towards me, catching her mouth in a long, slightly sugary kiss.

When I pulled back, her lips were curled in a wonderful crooked smile, and her eyes shone with desire. "Just don't get that stuff on the carpeting, okay?" she chided, beginning to open the buttons of her pajama top. Her shoulders relaxed the rest of the way as I slid the flannel down her arms and tossed the garment onto the floor. I intentionally avoided her breasts for the time being, taking her right arm in my hand, and retrieved my whipped topping from the side table, directing a small glob of the cream into her palm.

With my fingers, I spread the goo up each of her fingers all the way to their tips, then lifted her hand to my mouth, where I plunged each of her sticky digits in turn between my lips, slurping the residue from her skin and running my tongue devilishly against the tiny webs running between her fingers. When her fingers were clean, I continued licking her palm, pushing the tip of my tongue in a firm circle over the mounds and creases I found there.

I looked at her face to find her eyes gently shut and a small smile playing about her lips. I shook the can again, and sprayed a fine line from the inside of her wrist to her elbow. Without opening her eyes, she muttered, "I guess I'm gonna have to take a shower after this."

"At least," I growled into her hand, dipping my tongue at last into the cream icing the sensitive skin over her pulse point in her wrist. I used the key of her whimpers to guide the speed at which I continued lapping a path up the inside of her arm, stopping for a languid pause on her slightly-ticklish elbow. As soon as I finished laving her skin, and sometime after the last of the sugar had dissolved, I sat back and admired my love, her head tossed in divine abandon on the pillows, her hair swirled like the nested petals of a red rose around it. Her breasts had flattened a little with gravity, but her nipples formed hard buds pointing straight up. Her eyes opened halfway, the blue glistening out at me in arousal, and the corners of her mouth quirked up slightly as she watched me aim the nozzle of the aerosol can toward her beautiful body.

In rapid succession, I decorated her nipples and navel with whipped cream, then bent to take the closest breast into my mouth, suckling at the tender flesh made even sweeter by the white foam. Small fingers, still somewhat slippery with my saliva, wound into my hair and held me at her bosom, which bobbed gently with the increased speed and depth of her breathing. I finally broke away and enjoyed tasting and stroking her other breast, finishing by licking a wet line to her stomach and prodding into her perfect belly button.

Leaning back onto my elbow and setting aside the can, I glanced again at Scully, whose lips were parted and slack, setting free small moans of satisfaction. I lunged up and captured them with my sticky mouth, sampling the natural sweetness of her tongue with my own. Reaching for the waistband of her pajama pants, I tugged them off of her bottom along with her panties. Our kiss stretched on in time and intensity as I let my fingers creep once again into the soft, damp curls between her hips and search for the knot of firm flesh and sparkling nerves hiding within them.

My middle finger brushed cautiously at her clit, which acted almost like a tiny switch that made her entire body convulse and buck her center closer to my touch. "Mulder," she said shakily against my lips, "can I ask you a favor?"

I quickly moved my mouth away from hers and replaced it with my ear to hear her whisper. "Anything. Name it."

"Can we please skip the whipped cream from here on in?" In reply, I pressed my smiling lips against her peach-soft cheek, then moved to bring my head between her legs where my fingers had begun work that my tongue wished to continue. I imagined how uncomfortably sticky she might have felt had she not stopped me and my aerosol can, instead savoring her own precious essence as I made love to her with my mouth. Her legs served to block my ears somewhat, but her cries were still throaty and loud, so I must have been doing it right. At last she gasped and thrust into my face with a stuttering rhythm, and she came with a shudder all the way down her spine.

Eventually she began breathing like a human being again, though the noises she was making were more like those of a happy kitty. I raised my head from her wet center and smiled at the naked beauty lying spent before me. "Something tells me you're feeling a lot better now, eh, Scully?"

She pulled into a slow catlike stretch, grasping her hands high above her head and thrusting her breasts skyward as she arched up off the bed and collapsed again like overcooked spaghetti. "Whatever could have given you *that* idea?" she practically yawned. "Thank you for your assistance in my continued recovery, sweetie."

"More than happy to oblige, my dear," I cooed, repositioning myself next to her and cuddling her into my arms.

"Say, I wanted to ask you: where did you learn to do that tummy rub thing?"

"Actually, my mom used to do that when I was little and had an upset stomach."

She absently began stroking my chest through my shirt, preoccupied with her own thoughts, her eyes miles away. "I guess she did give you some good things in your life, after all."

"Yeah," I sighed, catching her hand and kissing her knuckles.

"But most of all, I guess I'm thankful she gave you to me, more or less. You mean everything to me, you know that?"

"Ohhhh," I began, kissing her quickly, "I think I had a vague idea. I'm thankful I have you, too. You know I love you, right?"

"Yup. Good thing, all things considered..." she smiled, kissing me again. "So, you in the mood for anything else?"

"What did you have in mind?"

"Dessert, maybe?" Her eyes flashed a sneaky message.

"Oh, no thanks. No pie for me. I just ate." She grabbed one of my nipples through the fabric that covered it and gave it a gentle twist, chuckling warmly.

"Maybe it's time for some f-word after all, Mulder."

"Are you sure, Scully?"

"Uh-huh," she murmured in a sultry voice, reaching to tug the tail of my shirt out of my jeans. "Hut one."